DegreeForum mentioned on the TESU blog!

[sanantone]

Marc, who heads a department at TESU, has been posting here for years. If the rest of the higher-ups didn't already know about the forum, Marc probably told them. It's just kind of unsettling that TESU is probably monitoring this forum to make decisions that make completing a degree less flexible and more expensive.

Why? They have no incentive to create obstacles or user cost. More profitable? Sure, because even non-profits need to be sustainable. If TESU doesn't make money, we don't have a college. But making it harder for the sake of making it harder doesn't match their mission or make sense financially.

There is an incentive to improve reputation and academic integrity. If they have the reputation of being a degree mill, then it doesn't bode well for the school or students with their degrees. Some changes make sense, but they do make completing a degree less flexible and sometimes more expensive, not just with money that will go to TESU, but with money you have to spend at other schools and course providers.

There are other ways they could have used this forum to draw in students, but didn't. They could have improved customer service, better trained their advisors, and stopped making unexpected changes in the middle of the academic year. Sometimes, they make changes without informing students until their credits are rejected. I have attended many schools, and I have never attended one, other than TESU, that would make drastic changes in the middle of the school year. They could have also fired Todd Siben years ago for yelling at students and intentionally giving them misinformation.

The fact is that TESU lost students in a recent year. I can't remember which one. There was a thread on DegreeInfo on the number of students attending online programs. I can understand adding the residency waiver to help with the money loss, but what did they think would happen after getting rid of the enrollment fee? They don't have the brightest people running that school, and they don't realize how bad customer service leads to losing students and money. They don't realize how unaddressed complaints on various websites affects their reputation.

It was 2016. Their enrollment dropped by about 500 or 600 students right after they stopped accepting TECEPs and portfolio assessments as residency credits with little notice. At first, it was almost no notice, but they extended the deadline after multiple complaints.